I was trying to stay away a bit from TortoiseHg. But it is baffling to read in the archives what happened while being unsubscribed for just two days.
Steve is obviously rather unhappy about the overlays on Windows. But I find it quite strange to -deprecate- a component to be replaced with something else that doesn't exist yet, not even as a mock up. The shell extension does have problems indeed, and it is indeed difficult to get the most of all what's possible on all platforms, but there are not only technical problems which make it hard to support the shell extension on this project for someone like me. But the overlay problems proclaimed are exaggerated in my opinion. Steve sounds as if the overlays would suddenly fall apart if they are not nurtured on a daily basis. This is not the case. The shell extension works quite fine on Windows XP and Vista, and there is no reason to assume that it would stop doing so suddenly. Even if a supporter is suddenly hit by a bus or chooses to quit the project (or part of it). After all, we are working unpaid on TortoiseHg (to my knowledge) and I even have to pay my development tools, Windows licenses and hardware myself (I admit, I truly hate having to pay yet again for access to Windows 7, I haven't done so yet). Sure, I have cursed the shell extension mechanism of Windows more than once (or the 'unset' state of files in .hg/dirstate), and before using the design we have now in place, the overlays were slowing down explorer to the point that I couldn't stand using them. Because for me, speed of the explorer is prime almost more than anything else. I for one can afford having to hit F5 sometimes -- if the alternatives are slowing down explorer to a crawl or having no overlays at all -- and frankly, I don't even have to hit F5 as often as Steve says he has to do it. I use TortoiseHg daily on Windows XP (including the shell extension *with* overlays enabled) and it works well, even with rather big repos on crappy old hardware. I can't remember having seen that case Steve is describing where all icons have disappeared, I not even can remember having seen a bug report for that. Of course, I might have overlooked it in the constant flow of bug reports which is inevitably generated by a project with such an increasingly large userbase -- after all there must be a couple of people using this stuff out there if we have nearly 10'000 downloads now in two weeks, with even Thanksgiving in between. So, is it really in such a bad shape, given this significant increase in downloads? I once was one of those who manually removed the registry settings for the overlay handlers after installing TortoiseHg, so I could use the rest. Today we have a simple effective setting in the registry to turn the overlays off, which has a gui access (unfortunately in the rpc server, but that seems to be getting moved to a better place, from reading the bug tracker). And we are quite close now to being able to offer a setting in the installer to have the overlays not enabled on install, with cmenu only. You don't want to have to have to hit F5? Well, you will have to do that in the contemplated file explorer as well. After all, there are other processes which manipulate repositories behind your back. Like for example the command line. Or other tools like IDE's which start hg processes as well. I've almost never seen the overlays being permanently stuck at the wrong state. Sometimes an F5 key press is need, yes. And in rare cases, I even have to do a "Update Icons" from the context menu (like after a rollback). But I bet there will be asynchronous states in the new file explorer as well. And you won't see any overlays in a file open dialog any more, once they are gone. I'm not against building a mercurial file explorer. Please do it. But you will have to show me the speed of your file explorer first, before I start believing the current overlays can be removed completely and permanently, without loosing a considerable number of Windows users. And I most likely will be unable to drag a file from your file explorer onto the desktop (given GTK's limitations). In short: there is no silver bullet. In the mean time, let's use what we have and let's not speak more ill of it than actually needed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Join us December 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, a free event focused on virtualization and cloud computing. Attend in-depth sessions from your desk. Your couch. Anywhere. http://p.sf.net/sfu/redhat-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Tortoisehg-discuss mailing list Tortoisehg-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tortoisehg-discuss
